Victorians and the fragility of progress

Over at Butterflies and Wheels, there's a quotation from Roger Scruton that snagged my eyes: "While treating us to some agreeable ventures in the history of ideas, he recycles the Victorian notion that the West has progressed from oppressive superstition to enlightened liberty."  As I noted in the comments, that "Victorian" bit requires considerable qualification.  There is indeed a strand of Victorian thought that joyously celebrates the rapidly-spreading glories of modernity.  But that strand sits right alongside a very different attitude to progress, one that sees it as inherently fragile, vulnerable to corruption from within, and always on the brink of reversal.  One of the reasons I became interested in Victorian attitudes to the Reformation was precisely this attitude, which writers frequently articulated in terms of cultural amnesia: far from permeating Victorian culture, they argued, the Reformation was consistently erased--and usually erased in the name of religious tolerance.  Here's a random example of this rhetoric, from a children's history I read a couple of nights ago:

"The Story of the Reformation" is one which Protestant England cannot afford to forget. But, unfortunately, historical events, however well known to the mind, lose very much of their reality through lapse of time. And it is to be feared that the grievous state of things before the Reformation, the terrible scenes which were needful to bring about a change, as well as a right sense of the improvement effected, are fast fading away, as to their reality, from the minds of people of the present day. They happened too long ago to have the influence they ought to have. And as a consequence, it is all the easier for misguided persons to be led in a backward and Rome-ward direction, as is now so lamentably the case.

Selina A. Bower's language here clearly presupposes some notion of Protestantism-as-progress; after all, the "Rome-ward direction" is "backward."  Nevertheless, like many of her contemporaries, Bower sees Protestantism, which is grounded on a clearly-defined historical foundation, threatened by its historicity.  To remain authentically Protestant, the country must remember Protestantism's origin in "terrible scenes," but both the passage of time and Protestantism's own success efface those scenes from active memory.  Toleration, not to mention conversion, derives from this widespread act of forgetting; toleration would be impossible, writers like Bower imply, were Protestants to remember.  As is so often the case, these complaints about forgetful Protestants weren't new in the nineteenth century: early modernists have found Protestants grumbling in a similar vein (both in Britain and on the Continent) as early as the seventeenth century.  But it's the local significance of this rhetoric that interests me.